Garden, and came home in triumph with “that folio Beaumont and Fletcher,” going forth almost in tears lest the book should be gone, and coming home rejoicing, carrying his sheaf with him.  Besides, whether Bodley and Dibdin like it or not, we must have a Royalty, for there were Queens who collected, and also on occasions stole books, and though she be not the greatest of the Queenly bookwomen and did not steal, we shall invite Mary Queen of Scots, while she is living in Holyrood, and has her library beside her.  Mary had a fine collection of books well chosen and beautifully bound, and as I look now at the catalogue it seems to me a library more learned than is likely to be found even in the study of an advanced young woman of to-day.  A Book of Devotion which was said to have belonged to her and afterwards to a Pope, gloriously bound, I was once allowed to look upon, but did not buy, because the price was marked in plain figures at a thousand guineas.  It would be something to sit in a corner and hear Monkbarns and Charles Lamb comparing notes, and to watch for the moment when Lamb would withdraw all he had said against the Scots people, or Earl Spencer describing with delight to the Duke of Roxburghe the battle of Sale.  But I will guarantee that the whole company of bookworms would end in paying tribute to that intelligent and very fascinating young woman from Holyrood, who still turns men’s heads across the stretch of centuries.  For even a bookman has got a heart.

Like most diseases the mania for books is hereditary, and if the father is touched with it the son can hardly escape, and it is not even necessary that the son should have known his father.  For Sainte-Beuve’s father died when he was an infant and his mother had no book tastes, but his father left him his books with many comments on the margins, and the book microbe was conveyed by the pages.  “I was born,” said the great critic in the Consolations, “I was born in a time of mourning; my cradle rested on a coffin . . . my father left me his soul, mind, and taste written on every margin of his books.”  When a boy grows up beside his father and his father is in the last stages of the book disease, there is hardly any power which can save that son, unless the mother be robustly illiterate, in which case the crossing of the blood may make him impervious.  For a father of this kind will unconsciously inoculate his boy, allowing him to play beside him in the bookroom, where the air is charged with germs (against which there is no disinfectant, I believe, except commercial conversation), and when the child is weary of his toys will give him an old book of travels, with quaint pictures which never depart from the memory.  By and by, so thoughtless is this invalid father, who has suffered enough, surely, himself from this disease, that he will allow his boy to open parcels of books, reeking with infection, and explain to him the rarity of a certain first edition, or show him the thickness of the paper and the glory of the black-letter in an ancient book.  Afterwards, when the boy himself has taken ill and begun on his own account to prowl through the smaller bookstalls, his father will listen greedily to the stories he has to tell in the evening, and will chuckle aloud when one day the poor victim of this deadly illness comes home with a newspaper of the time of Charles II., which he has bought for threepence.  It is only a question of time when that lad, being now on an allowance of his own, will be going about in a suit of disgracefully shabby tweeds, that he may purchase a Theophrastus of fine print and binding upon which he has long had his eye, and will be taking milk and bread for his lunch in the city, because he has a foolish ambition to acquire by a year’s saving the Kelmscott edition of the Golden Legend.  A change of air might cure him, as for instance twenty years’ residence on an American ranch, but even then on his return the disease might break out again: indeed the chances are strong that he is really incurable.  Last week I saw such a case—the bookman of the second generation in a certain shop where such unfortunates collect.  For an hour he had been there browsing along the shelves, his hat tilted back upon his head that he might hold the books the nearer to his eyes, and an umbrella under his left arm, projecting awkwardly, which he had not laid down, because he did not intend to stay more than two minutes, and knew indeed, as the father of a family, that he ought not to be there at all.  He often drops in, for this is not one of those stores where a tradesman hurries forward to ask what you want and offers you the last novel which has captivated the juicy British palate; the bookman regards such a place with the same feeling that a physician has to a patent drug-store.  The dealer in this place so loved his books that he almost preferred a customer who knew them above one who bought them, and honestly felt a pang when a choice book was sold.  Never can I forget what the great Quaritch said to me when he was showing me the inner shrine of his treasure-house, and I felt it honest to explain that I could only look, lest he should think me an impostor.  “I would sooner show such books to a man that loved them though he couldn’t buy them, than a man who gave me my price and didn’t know what he had got.”  With this slight anecdote I would in passing pay the tribute of bookmen to the chief hunter of big game in our day.

When the bookman is a family man, and I have sometimes doubts whether he ought not to be a celibate like missionaries of religion and other persons called to special devotion, he has of course to battle against his temptation, and his struggles are very pathetic.  The parallel between dipsomania and bibliomania is very close and suggestive, and I have often thought that more should be made of it.  It is the wife who in both cases is usually the sufferer and good angel, and under her happy influence the bookman will sometimes take the pledge, and for him, it is needless to say, there is only one cure.  He cannot be a moderate drinker, for there is no possibility of moderation, and if he is to be saved he must become a total abstainer.  He must sign the pledge, and the pledge must be made of a solemn character with witnesses, say his poor afflicted wife and some intelligent self-made Philistine.  Perhaps it might run like this: “I, A. B., do hereby promise that I will never buy a classical book in any tongue, or any book in a rare edition; that I will never spend money on books in tree-calf or tooled morocco; that I shall never enter a real old bookshop, but should it be necessary shall purchase my books at a dry goods store, and there shall never buy anything but the cheapest religious literature, or occasionally a popular story for my wife, and to this promise I solemnly set my hand.”  With the ruin of his family before his eyes, or at least, let us say, the disgraceful condition of the dining-room carpet, he intends to keep his word, and for a whole fortnight will not allow himself to enter the street of his favourite bookshop.  Next week, however, business, so he says at least, takes him down the street, but he remembers the danger, and makes a brave effort to pass a public-house.  The mischief of the thing, however, is that there is another public-house in the street and passing it whets the latent appetite, and when he is making a brave dash past his own, some poor inebriate, coming out reluctantly, holds the door open, and the smell is too much for his new-born virtue.  He will go in just for a moment to pass the time of day with his friend the publican and see his last brand of books, but not to buy—I mean to drink—and then he comes across a little volume, the smallest and slimmest of volumes, a mere trifle of a thing, and not dear, but a thing which does not often turn up and which would just round off his collection at a particular point.  It is only a mere taste, not downright drinking; but ah me, it sets him on fire again, and I who had seen him go